Automate FOG Installation?

[TBuzaTechnician]

Hello everyone!
I am currently looking into the vast FOG Installation scripts and I am attempting to find a way to automate the installation of FOG Servers with the exact same configurations. (Not Storage Nodes)

Scenario: Include FOG as a default install option in a custom Ubuntu Server ISO. It must install automatically without needing user input. Everything in my ISO works perfectly, but I cannot find a way to make the FOG Installation scripts “Static”.

What I’ve Tried:
Setting Static Variables within the scripts,
Manual Expect Script
AutoExpect Scripts
xdotool
Piping answers “via TXT file, and execution command”
(Probably more, but I don’t remember at this point.)

Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you.

[Sebastian Roth]

@TBuzaTechnician Have you tried running the installer like this yet? ./installfog.sh -y

This will just run through using all settings as default. If you need to modify specific settings there are command line switches for a lot of things and we could even add more if there is need to. Just run ./installfog.sh --help to show the command line switches. Be aware, there is an issue with the long form command line switches like --ssl-path ... - they simply don’t work but the short form -c ... should do.

[Sebastian Roth]

@TBuzaTechnician By the way, we use this so called auto answer mode of the installer too. Thanks to @Wayne-Workman we have an automated installer test running: http://fogtesting.theworkmans.us/

[TBuzaTechnician]

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks for the help! I will give it a try. I Know a few of the defaults are include things I want to avoid. Like using the FOG DHCP service.

[Sebastian Roth]

@TBuzaTechnician The default is to not make FOG the DHCP…

[TBuzaTechnician]

Hello!

Thanks for the help. Just in case someone has a similar scenario… You can find what I did below.

Here I modified the initial values to what I needed. This seemed to have made sure that the values I entered were the settings to be used when installed. After doing this, I ran with the -y switch and without, and both seemed to work fine.

\fogproject-1.5.7\bin\installfog.sh (Lines 351 - 371)

[[ -z $dnsaddress ]] && dnsaddress=""
[[ -z $username ]] && username=""
[[ -z $password ]] && password=""
[[ -z $osid ]] && osid=""
[[ -z $osname ]] && osname=""
[[ -z $dodhcp ]] && dodhcp=""
[[ -z $bldhcp ]] && bldhcp=""
[[ -z $installtype ]] && installtype=""
[[ -z $interface ]] && interface=""
[[ -z $ipaddress  ]] && ipaddress=""
[[ -z $hostname  ]] && hostname=""
[[ -z $routeraddress ]] && routeraddress=""
[[ -z $plainrouter ]] && plainrouter=""
[[ -z $blexports ]] && blexports=1
[[ -z $installlang ]] && installlang=0
[[ -z $bluseralreadyexists ]] && bluseralreadyexists=0
[[ -z $guessdefaults ]] && guessdefaults=1
[[ -z $doupdate ]] && doupdate=1
[[ -z $ignorehtmldoc ]] && ignorehtmldoc=0
[[ -z $httpproto ]] && httpproto="http"
[[ -z $fogpriorconfig ]] && fogpriorconfig="$fogprogramdir/.fogsettings"

Again, thank you for the help!

[Wayne Workman]

@TBuzaTechnician You can also pre-place your .fogsettings file, rather than modifying the source code every time. Here’s a writeup on that settings file:
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=.fogsettings
Modifying the source is cool too, whatever shakes your feathers.

[TBuzaTechnician]

@Wayne-Workman Thanks for the info. I did modify the .fogsettings file at first, but I was receiving errors for “invalid response” whenever I attempted to install. I just copied the .fogsettings from a working installation.